the Lothians—­and the English bordering counties, Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin Hood’s haunts.  It is not possible to assign exact dates to these songs.  They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were composed.  In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering minstrels.  In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd.  They were learned by ancient dames, who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren.  In this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom conservative and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity.  Walter Scott got much of the material for his “Ministrelsy of the Border” from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick Forest.  Professor Child’s—­the latest and fullest ballad collection—­contains pieces never before given in print or manuscript, some of them obtained in America![2]

Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents, descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the different ballads.  The circumstance, e.g., of the birk and the briar springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches occurs in the ballads of “Fair Margaret and Sweet William,” “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet,” “Lord Lovel,” “Fair Janet,” and many others.  The knight who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in “Tam Lin,” “Thomas Rymer,"[3] etc.  Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property, and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole.  Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed, they bear no author’s name, but are ferae naturae and have the flavor of wild game.  They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone could contribute toward them:  generations of nameless poets, minstrels, ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on.